Nieves Romero-Díaz

Nieves Romero-Díaz's main area of research is gender and race in Early Modern Spain. She has authored and edited/co-edited 4 books and more than 30 articles, reviews, and book chapters. Making historical and critical connections between the past and the present, her courses include Black Spain, Spain and Islam, and Gender Violence in Spain. She has received numerous (inter)national grants and awards and has presented her research at conferences, invited lectures, and symposiums in England, France, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and the US.

Ombretta Frau

Ombretta Frau has published extensively on nineteenth and early twentieth-century Italian cultural history, modern philology, Pirandello, and Italian women writers. At Mount Holyoke, Frau’s courses include literature for children, material culture, fascism, women, theater, and travel literature. Her classes incorporate many pedagogical tools, including film, music, and web design, and she believes in creating a relaxed and friendly classroom atmosphere that encourages communication. Frau is a frequent collaborator of the Mount Holyoke Art Museum and she keeps a blog that is on the Italian Huffington Post.

Esther Castro Cuenca

Esther Castro Cuenca is a Senior Lecturer and the language program director of the Department of Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American Studies. Her research focuses on second language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, and interfaces between psycholinguistics and language learning/teaching. She teaches various levels of Spanish language as well as courses on linguistics, translation, and second language acquisition and pedagogy.

Martino Lovato

Martino Lovato works on the intersection between Italian, French and Arabic literatures and cinema. At Mount Holyoke he teaches language, literature, and cinema at the departments of Italian Studies and Romance Languages and Cultures. He loves the study of languages and stories of all kinds. His research interests include the Mediterranean in theory and cultural history, border crossing, and medievalism in historical novels. In Fall 2017 he is teaching the introductory course to modern Italian literature, ITAL 222; and Catastrophe and Rebirth in Italian Cinema: from Dolce Vita to Trumpusconi, ITAL 341 CN, taught in English and Italian.

Carolyn Shread

Carolyn Shread is a translator of scholarly and literary texts, including five books by French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Several of her articles propose new paradigms for translation, drawing on Malabou and Bracha Ettinger. She has also published on her translation of Les Rapaces by Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet, and is on the editorial board of the Haitian journal Legs et Littérature, as well as assistant editor to Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal.

Affiliated Faculty

Justin Crumbaugh

Professor Crumbaugh’s research focuses on contemporary Spain. He is the author of Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain’s Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference (SUNY Press 2009) and co-author of Spanish Fascist Writing (U of Toronto Press forthcoming). Professor Crumbaugh’s articles have appeared in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, the Hispanic Review, the Hispanic Research Journal, the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and other scholarly venues. His publications include studies on the cultural formations surrounding the Franco dictatorship, tourism, terrorism, and political victimhood.